by Will Romano
Dream Theater were still fairly young in 1993, and their influences—from Steve Vai to Steve Morse—were clearly on display. And as such, perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on them. Everyone has to start somewhere.
Though some hero worship still slips through, Dream Theater have forged their own sound. There’s music and emotion there.
Dream Theater understand that when bands work in odd times, they have a responsibility to make the song groove and to make it accessible to the man on the street. Geddy Lee commented in Bass Player magazine in 1988 on Rush’s ability to play smoothly through odd time signatures: “After a certain point, [odd time signatures] become more musical and less mathematical. But that’s only after learning to feel comfortable with a particular time signature. Like with us, playing in 7 is now so comfortable we almost never have to count it.”
By the time Dream Theater reached their third studio record, 1994’s Awake, something had come alive inside them, namely ferocity and the ability to move through odd times with alacrity. Add to this the fact that singer LaBrie seemed to find his “voice” on Awake, as dynamic tunes such as “The Silent Man,” the acoustic section of the three-part opus “A Mind Beside Itself,” and “Lifting Shadows off a Dream” stress. In some cases, the venomous Dave Mustaine growl LaBrie injects into the goth-metal gospel tune (of sorts) “The Mirror” (written about Portnoy’s struggle with alcoholism) is just as effective, maybe more so, than his signature supreme vibrato.
The band was expanding in other areas as well. “Space-Dye Vest,” for instance, seems to wallow in self-pity, a sentiment underscored by Moore’s choice of self-effacing, self-aware, utterly sad, and somewhat satirical audio clips, somehow poking fun at the fact that the speaker is experiencing a clichéd human emotion (though the pain is no more unreal for it). Likewise, “Ytse Jam” might have been the band’s answer to Rush’s “YYZ,” but “Erotomania,” the instrumental section of “A Mind Beside Itself,” is Dream Theater coming into their own. Though strains of influences reveal themselves (for example, it’s hard not to think of Steve Morse’s speed-demon picking in Petrucci’s gnarly guitar runs), 1994’s Awake is unlike most records of the time.
By the time Dream Theater were ready to record A Change of Seasons with new keyboardist Derek Sherinian, the band relied on a tried-and-true method: recording tried-and-true material belonging to other artists such as Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, the Dixie Dregs, Kansas, Queen, or Elton John.
The danger in covering well-known songs is that they will inevitably be compared to the originals. Dream Theater took that risk with A Change of Seasons, on which cover songs serve as a lifeline for a band confused by the recent exit of its founding member keyboardist, Moore.
The twenty-three-minute title track—the only original song on the record—became the band’s first magnum opus, veering in a direction Dream Theater had only hinted at in the past with tracks such as “Learning to Live,” “Metropolis—Part 1,” “Scarred,” and “Voices,” but there had never been anything this extravagant on record. (Even here, however, the song was written back in 1989 and was meant to be included on 1992’s Images and Words. Fans knew the song existed and that it had never been released; evidently, Dream Theater decided there was no better time to give the people what they want).
Aside from the occasional busy drumming, the obvious use of odd times, and the winding undercurrent of guitars and keyboards, the song seems like an attempt by Dream Theater to marry complexity and accessibility. The floodgates had opened: Dream Theater would continue to rope in listeners with their technical prowess and challenge them with such long compositions as “Trail of Tears” (Falling into Infinity) and the 1999 concept album, Metropolis Part 2: Scenes from a Memory.
After a period of recording dormancy (the band’s label experienced personnel changes, none of them too kind to the band), the band finally released 1997’s Falling into Infinity after the dust settled. Dream Theater were secure in a contract, but there was a catch: Hearing something commercial in the band’s music (or simply trying to squeeze whatever money they could out of the band), the label suggested DT carry on in the direction they’d hinted at with A Change of Seasons. Attempting to do so spelled near disaster for Dream Theater, who nearly tore themselves apart trying to please the label and essentially be something they were not.
At a sensitive time in the band’s life, Magna Carta Records threw some in the band a lifeline and proposed that Petrucci and Portnoy put together a supergroup, which was dubbed Liquid Tension Experiment and featured bassist Tony Levin. They recruited Dregs keyboardist Jordan Rudess, who had slipped through the band’s fingers a few years earlier.
Rudess tells a long, crazy tale as to how he joined Dream Theater: “One day I got a call from the Dream Theater management about the possibility of coming for an audition to their group,” Rudess says. “They had gotten my name from Kevin Moore, who had mentioned me in passing at some point as someone whose keyboard playing he respected. So it was a recommendation plus the fact that [the band] had been looking in a magazines for a keyboard player, and they had seen in Keyboard magazine [that I] had won a readers award .. .[for] Best New Talent. I thought I should call them, but I didn’t know who they were and didn’t know anything about Dream Theater. A friend had been writing for some magazines at that point and had interviewed them and had a copy of Images and Words. I listened to it and it seemed really interesting to me. It really had that progressive rock sound that I love, but it also had metal virtuosity, which I hadn’t really heard mixed with progressive rock. Granted, Yes and Genesis were paying some complicated stuff, but there was something about the intensity, speed, clarity, just the whole focused-playing thing that really turned me on.
“They ended up inviting me to this big convention, Foundations Forum—a big heavy metal convention they were headlining. I decided I would do the Forum, but I needed some more time to think about the band thing. At the same time that that happened, I got a call from the Dixie Dregs management about joining that band. Jerry Goodman [electric violinist] had heard me play at NAMM show and he was talking about me to some of the guys in the group, and I think that Jan Hammer’s manager, Elliot Sears, was telling the Dregs about me. So anyway, they got my number and I ended up sending off a copy of Listen [Rudess’s 1993 solo record] to Steve Morse to hear. In the same week, I learned all the Dream Theater material and all of the Dregs stuff. I had gone through an audition with the Dregs as well. At that time I had a choice: I could either do the Dregs or I could join Dream theater. I ended up doing the Foundations Forum thing and then got counseling from Steve Morse to do a couple gigs with the Dregs to figure out what I want to do. I decided at that point it was better for me not to join Dream Theater, because I felt like Dream Theater was going on the road for a very long time and they were a pretty new band; they didn’t know which direction that were going to go in.
Dream Theater scored a rare hit early in their career with 1992’s Images and Words (left).
In 1993, DT recorded at British prog’s ground zero.
“After that, I got a call from [Magna Carta label chief] Peter Morticelli about joining this group that Mike Portnoy was putting together called the Liquid Tension Experiment, although it was not called that at that point,” says Rudess. “Mike was putting together what he called a supergroup. They had Tony Levin on bass, they had me on keyboards, and they didn’t know who they wanted on guitar but that was to be determined. So I thought to myself, ‘This is cool. I didn’t join Dream Theater and now I am getting a call from the Dream Theater drummer for this. I will do that.’ Then I found out that John Petrucci was going to do it as well. I ended up doing two albums, and both of those were among Magna Carta’s most successful, and for us it was personally successful because I had a great time with the guys and enjoyed hanging out and writing music with them. At the end of making the second Liquid Tension album, the guys approached me about joining the band again. I was in a different headspace then, but it wasn�
�t only that. Dream Theater was in a different space. Everybody was in a different place. Dream Theater had just completed their Awake tour, they had done the A Change of Seasons thing, Falling into Infinity. They were more solid, and it seemed like the band was going to stick around. I was older and I felt more comfortable, and I knew I could work with them.”
Dream Theater had the difficult task of breaking the news to Sherinian, but once the band shed the keyboard player, it was as though a mental load had been relieved—the entire Falling into Infinity time period was weighing heavy on the band, and Sherinian, as great as he was and is, could only serve to remind the band of less-than-stellar days.
“They were excited about me being a composer, and they had these windows of parameters and would police those parameters pretty carefully,” says Rudess. “Initially, I thought [the writing process] was similar to [that of] Liquid Tension Experiment but I soon learned that this wasn’t the case. There were a different set of parameters by which Dream Theater operates. They brought me into the band because John really wanted to have a writing partner.... I had to learn quickly what kinds of things worked and what things didn’t. But to this day my job and what they expect me to do is push the boundaries a little bit and to challenge the listener and offer things that would not be within the normal spectrum of a metal band. So I convince them to go in directions that I normally wouldn’t. Sometimes my role involves getting my ideas rejected. You know, ‘This is too crazy an idea for Dream Theater.’ I had a whole musical life before that band and it included some pretty bizarre styles. I feel like I want to bring in all of these styles.”
Rudess, who studied at Julliard from ages nine through nineteen (until he heard Gentle Giant’s Free Hand, got his hands on his first Minimoog synthesizer, and gave up the idea of being a concert pianist), had an immediate musical impact on the band’s sound. In the wake of Falling into Infinity, and instead of folding, Dream Theater released what may be its 2112, the concept record Metropolis Part 2: Scenes from a Memory, perhaps the densest single disc the band had ever recorded. They even refer to themselves as “the orchestra” in the record’s liner notes, as if we were watching and listening to a theatrical production. The band was not catering to anyone, except perhaps themselves. For one thing, the concept of the album is almost indecipherable without CliffsNotes. The basic skeleton on involves the fictional 1928 murder of a young woman, reincarnation, one man’s mental regression into a past life, a journey of self-discovery, a belief in the afterlife, and a possible reference to the triumph and tragedy of the Kennedy family, tying together the “sleeper and the miracle” and “dance of eternity” motif of
“Metropolis—Part I.” Although the music and the story line could have been more closely entwined, the album is on the whole extraordinary, if at times slightly derivative (e.g., the whirlwind of sound in the Zappa-esque, vibraphone texture-led jam of “Beyond This Life,” the Pink Floyd-ish gospel voice of “Through Her Eyes”, a Indian-inflected lead heavy metal guitar line à la Metallica’s “Wherever I May Roam” in “Home”). Perhaps in an attempt to win back progressive rock fans—and fans in general—the band went for broke, throwing everything but the kitchen sink into their new record.
“One of the things that we did on
[Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence] as well as Scenes from a Memory is we wrote the record in the recording studio and recorded as we wrote,” explained Petrucci in 2001. “We skipped a demoing period, and so the core of the music and the core of the construction of the songs is very, very instinctual. A lot more of the crafting happens while are recording the overdubs. Similarly, with Falling into Infinity, we were set up in such a way [that] if we had a live performance that was good, we’d keep a lot of it.”
As much as they did on any record up to that point and perhaps since, the band moved very smoothly through odd times. Portnoy, in particular, navigates them very well, often playing very tricky, off-kilter tempos.
“I’ve been playing in 7, 9, 11, 23, just as long as I’ve been playing in 4,” Portnoy said. “I treat all numbers equally, you know? There’s no reason playing in 7 should be any more difficult than 4. It is just a number.”
Rudess added important elements to the band’s music and conducted and arranged parts for a gospel choir for the production. “I definitely think I added some things to the band that they didn’t have before,” says Rudess. “One of the main things is, they didn’t have someone who could orchestrate keyboard parts. Derek and Kevin, they were wonderful keyboard players, but they were coming from an approach that, ‘Okay, I’ll do this particular keyboard part and maybe add a string line here.’ ... My approach has been to [record] many tracks and then layer them. If I’m doing an actual orchestral sound, I will layer some strings and then I’ll do a horn part, and then I’ll do the winds. Then I’m layering synth textures. Also, I like to create my own synthesizer sounds. Usually I’ll tailor the sounds to what I’m hearing in my head as opposed to relying on a factory patch.... I think there’s a noticeable difference that comes out in the music when you are sound-designing for the exact music that you are creating.”
“Fans adore the record,” said Portnoy. “The tour was completely sold out, night after night around the world. The success from Scenes, the fact that we were able to make that on our own terms... opened the door and gave us the ultimate freedom to finally do whatever the hell we wanted without any outside interference or direction.”
In an incredible twist of fate, the band’s live album and boxed set from that tour, Live Scenes from New York, which contained the entirety of the Metropolis Part 2: Scenes from a Memory, was released on September 11, 2001, with cover art that depicted Manhattan and, in particular, the Twin Towers, up in flames. (The band and Elektra Records recalled the set, issued an apology, and repackaged the release.)
Their next studio album, 2002’s Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence—a double record with one five-song disc featuring unrelated tunes and the second disc dedicated to a forty-plus-minute composition in eight parts, following the lives of six emotionally or mentally disturbed and deeply misunderstood individuals fending off their own ever-darkening troubled minds.
The band had arrived at Bear Tracks in March 2001 and delivered the finished record in October. “We locked the place and threw all our gear in there and wrote and recorded simultaneously,” Portnoy said, “as we had done with Scenes and Liquid Tension.”
Dream Theater took the show on the road through America, to Europe and Asia, expanding their global reach. Amid this, the band was receiving some of the best reviews of its career, from unlikely sources. Entertainment Weekly, which would have ordinarily turned their noses up at such progressive rock music, dedicated well over a page to a review of Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, grading it a “B,” saying this post-9/11 world could use a bit of fantasy.
“It makes you wonder which act is gutsier: Eminem slamming another teen-pop star or Dream Theater ignoring, and thereby dissing, every style of music that’s existed since 1976,” wrote David Browne in February 2002.
This is only partially true, of course. Dream Theater do ignore some trends, but they pick up on plenty of others (as the Radiohead-inspired tune “Disappear” indicates). At worst, Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence is an update of Yes, Genesis, and ELP with dashes of Tool, Metallica, and post-Van Halen guitar histrionics thrown in for good measure. Other records followed, such as the heavy metal and grunge extravaganza Train of Thought, the triple-disc Live at Budokan, 2005’s eight-track Octavarium, and 2007’s Systematic Chaos.
Despite its dark moments, Dream Theater—with all of its fretboard, keyboard, vocal, and rhythmic acrobatics—offers a sense of hope that anything is possible. The production process for Systematic Chaos (“the title of which is an accurate description of our music,” says Rudess) was infused with creative possibilities.
“It wasn’t a conceptual thing,” says Paul Northfield, who engineered and mixed the album, “... but the production process was a
bit of a systematic chaos. At some point it was like they were sitting around and then all hell would break loose and things would happen very quickly. For one thing, Mike had two drum kits set up, as he often does, and wanted to be able to record with either one of them instantly. He wanted to turn around and work his John Bonham basic kit or his big progressive kit. Using two kits may have influenced him to play certain ways. I know he used the smaller kit for ‘Constant Motion.’ It was all quite tricky, because you have something like thirty or forty channels of drum miking. So it was all quite complicated to set it all up. But once it was set up, you would be in position to record. So that is the way we made that record....”
Systematic Chaos also sees Dream Theater on a new label—Roadrunner.
Unlike other labels Dream Theater had been on, Roadrunner gave the band free rein to do what they wanted musically and artistically, and because they were working with a new record company—for the most part, a heavy metal label—Dream Theater felt they needed to make a suitable recording because of it. “I think the feeling came from within the band that we should deliver an album, as Mike would say, that is ballsy, has a lot of chunk—a heavier album,” says Rudess. “It’s not as though we changed our style per se because Roadrunner asked us to. It is more [that] we realized that it made sense to direct the music a little bit in a particular way.”
Dream Theater followed up Systematic Chaos with their tenth studio album, Black Clouds & Silver Linings—a great summation of the band’s career thus far. Throughout the dark moments of the band’s career, its members have managed to see the positive side of a lifestyle that could have chewed them up and spit them out.
